Valve: "No one besides Valve is allowed to send DMCA notices for games streamed off of DotaTV."

In a new post, Valve states that it is the only entity with the power to send out DMCA notices for games streamed off of DotaTV (assuming the stream isn't using the broadcaster's unique content). Valve goes on to say it designed the guidelines to be flexible, and that it will be Valve's judgment alone to decide who has violated its broadcasting rules.

Valve's full statement is below:

We’ve been seeing a bunch of discussion regarding DotaTV and want to expand on what we’ve said before.

The first issue we’ve been seeing discussed is regarding DMCA notices. This one is very simple: No one besides Valve is allowed to send DMCA notices for games streamed off of DotaTV that aren’t using the broadcasters’ unique content (camera movements, voice, etc).

The second issue is regarding who is permitted to cast off of DotaTV. We designed the DotaTV guidelines to be flexible in order to allow for up and coming casters, or community figures like BSJ or Bulldog that occasionally watch tournament games on their channel, to be able to stream off of DotaTV. It is not to allow commercial organizations like BTS to compete with the primary stream. It’ll be our judgment alone on who violates this guideline and not any other third party’s.

For some background: on January 18, ESL announced that Facebook had attained the rights to be the main broadcast platform for a wide variety of its events, including the upcoming Dota Minor in Genting. This news disappointed many Dota community members who were hoping to watch the event on Twitch.

As a result, a number of Dota personalities not involved with ESL announced plans to stream the event on their personal channels, citing guidelines set by Valve late last year. According to Valve's rules, anyone can broadcast any Dota game for their own audience using the in-game spectator tools. The only rule is that streamers cannot do so in a commercial way (no overlays/advertising), can't use official broadcast content (such as casting audio or camerawork), and cannot do so in a way that competes with the original stream. Valve ends the post by saying "In general, everyone should play nice together, and we think the boundaries should be pretty clear."

Unfortunately the guidelines were not 100% clear, and when popular Dota personalities like PPD, AdmiralBulldog, and BSJ streamed the ESL One Genting games with their own commentary they were quickly issued DMCA takedowns by ESL and were threatened with channel bans. All these streamers felt that they were within their rights laid out by Valve, but ESL (likely considering its deal with Facebook) felt that these streams competed with its own. ESL's Senior Vice President of Product, Ulrich Schulze, attempted to clear the air with an AMA on Reddit, but ultimately just drew more ire from the community.

Which brings us to today. In the midst of all this confusion, Valve's new statement reopens the floodgates for community streamers to cover the event, and leaves ESL without many options to contest.

Considering Facebook likely paid a large sum to attain these streaming rights, it will be interesting to see how other large media companies approach Dota content in the future knowing they may be undercut by popular streamers on competing platforms.

Sam Stewart is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.